Online Shopping: Disrupting Retail, and Drivers’ Lives

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U.P.S. drivers do stretches before departing to make deliveries earlier this year. The company will deliver 750 million packages in the month after Thanksgiving.CreditDon Emmert/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

At lunchtime Thursday, Miguel Lopez paused on his rounds in Elmhurst, Queens. He got hired part-time for United Parcel Service when he was 23. That was two decades ago. A small start-up mail order company called Amazon was then in its early days selling books online, a blip that became a behemoth. The part-time job has ballooned so much that what is part-time is his life outside work.

“Yesterday, I did 113 stops,” Mr. Lopez said. “I touched a little less than 200 pieces.”

Gustavo Escobar, 36, a U.P.S. driver on a route in Forest Hills, Queens, looked over a list of his own work. “It’s 209 stops,” he said. “Some of them are multiple packages.”

This year, a cascade of online purchases the weekend after Thanksgiving swamped delivery companies. U.P.S. had hired 95,000 seasonal workers, but that was not enough. Packages were delayed. Last Friday, thousands of workers around the country were told that they would have to work a sixth day.

“They told me to come to work on Saturday, less than 24 hours beforehand,” Mr. Escobar said. “I had scheduled medical appointments. With my personal situation, I had visitation with my son, who is 9.”

Despite the instruction, Mr. Escobar, who has been with the company 14 years, did not go to work Saturday. On Monday, he got notified about a disciplinary process. So did about 70 other workers in the New York area. The same conflicts arose in a half-dozen other U.P.S. hubs around the country, Steve Gaut, a spokesman for the company, said. Eddie Villalta, the president of Local 804 of the Teamsters, protested, and the workers around the country are also represented by Teamsters locals, so presumably this will be thrashed out.

The dispute is a reminder, though, that Mr. Escobar and Mr. Lopez and legions of others in the delivery business work on the edge of the tectonic shift in how people buy goods. Bricks and mortar have dissolved into flesh, blood and trucks.

Wages and benefits make U.P.S. an attractive employer. Mr. Escobar said he earns about $35 an hour, plus health care and retirement. The dwindling prospect of work or real estate investment in malls has been replaced by the surge of possibilities in the delivery world. This year, U.P.S. expects to deliver 750 million packages in the month after Thanksgiving, not quite double the load of 440 million in 2010. So the outlook for employment in shipping is good, at least until drones start delivering packages, like the owls who bring Harry Potter his mail.

But, he said, his workweek runs 48 to 60 hours, making a day off more precious. He will report to work this Saturday for his sixth day — reluctantly, because he will have to make arrangements for child care.

Mr. Lopez is a shop steward with the union. “I knew what I signed up for close to 20 years ago,” Mr. Lopez said. “I tell people, this is not a nine-to-five job. Sometimes, it’s nine to seven, or nine to nine, or nine to 10. They put a lot more pressure on us to deliver everything.”

Mr. Gaut of U.P.S. said the company had planned for growth from last year, but had been surprised by the sheer number of packages it had to deliver last week. Measures that it took to spread out the delivery period, like charging higher prices at certain times, had not been enough, he said.

“There has to be a level of predictability for the company and for the employees,” he said.

Federal rules limit the hours that truck drivers can work to 60 hours over seven days, or 70 hours over eight days, Mr. Gaut said. Then a worker must get 34 hours off.

Mr. Lopez said that the employees are pressed to watch the limits, while being pushed to carry more packages. “The demands have been getting worse and worse as the years go on,” Mr. Lopez said. “The volume has skyrocketed. There’s so much work that they don’t even know what to do with it.”

It bothered Mr. Escobar that he was pushed at the last minute to work an extra day, and that he was threatened with disciplinary action because the company was apparently unprepared.

“I want to say this: I love this job,” he said. “Building relationships, seeing the joy on people’s faces when you bring their stuff, that feels good. Somehow, I’m going to have get that extra cup of coffee and do it.”